When Compliance Becomes a Cage

A letter about what behavioral therapy really taught me

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I’ve been thinking about how to explain this. Not just the facts, but the feeling of it. The impact. Not as a headline, or a theory, or even a blog post - but as something closer to a letter. One I would write to someone who actually wants to understand.

So here it is.

I want to talk about what it’s like to be shaped by compliance training. To be trained - for years on end - to respond with “I’m fine with whatever you want,” even when I’m not. To feel, in my bones, that saying yes - always yes - is the only truly safe way to move through the world.

None of this is because I’m a people-pleaser. That’s too tidy. I say yes because I was conditioned to believe that having needs makes me a problem. That having preferences makes me difficult. That existing fully - as I actually am - risks connection, comfort, and safety.

Behavioral therapy didn’t help me navigate life. It helped me disappear inside it.

What therapy taught me without saying it out loud

They say they’re teaching life skills.

Preparing autistic and ADHD people like me to be more independent, more socially fluent, more successful.

But what they don’t say - what they can’t say - is that the real motivation behind every so-called “care decision” isn’t my well-being.

And it’s not my future.

It’s comfort. But not ours.

I wasn’t taught how to ask for what I need. I was taught how to stop needing - or at least to need more conveniently

I wasn’t taught how to self-regulate. I was taught how to self-suppress.

Because when a child is praised only when they’re quiet, still, agreeable - what else are they supposed to learn? I didn’t internalize skills. I internalized shame.

And it’s not just about childhood. I still feel it now. I still watch myself shape-shift in real time, editing who I am to take up as little emotional space as possible.

Sometimes I catch myself in the middle of it - over-accommodating, over-explaining, over-functioning - and I realize I’m not trying to connect. I’m trying to avoid becoming someone else’s burden.

Because that’s the lesson I learned the most clearly: that I am easiest to love when I am easiest to manage.

What compliance training stole from me

There are things I never learned because I was too busy learning how to stay small.

One of the more impactful has been understanding what I want. Then holding onto it without shame. How to feel something uncomfortable without immediately trying to make someone else feel better instead.

I’ve lost relationships because of this. Or maybe I’ve lost myself inside relationships - sacrificing my voice, my boundaries, my needs - until there’s nothing left to connect with.

It’s made me wildly susceptible to narcissists and emotional opportunists - people who sense that I will rearrange myself to keep the peace. People who notice how quickly I take on the guilt of merely being in the room.

I’ve ended up with more responsibilities, more pressure, more compromises than were good for me - because I was always working to “earn” what others were just allowed to have.

Even winning - success, opportunity, visibility - feels unsafe. I’ve caught myself thinking, They probably need "it" more than I do. As if there’s something morally wrong with (only me) having enough of anything at all.

The mask and the disconnect

Masking isn’t just about eye contact or fidgeting. It’s about covering up your instincts so thoroughly that, after a while, you can’t find them anymore.

And sure, it made me appear more “normal” in meetings. It made school easier for the adults around me. But the cost has been a lifetime of slow, internal erosion.

When you spend years trying not to be yourself, you eventually forget how.

And when you can’t locate yourself, how can you advocate for your needs? How can you even recognize them?

Burnout doesn’t come from being neurodivergent. It comes from being expected to behave as if you’re not.

What I wish people understood

Behavioral modification therapy didn’t teach me to function. It taught me to disappear in plain sight.

It taught me that comfort - other people’s comfort - matters more than my clarity, my pain, my truth.

It taught me to be grateful for crumbs of inclusion, even when they came at the cost of self-erasure.

It taught me that the safest way to exist was quietly, invisibly, compliantly.

And I don’t think that’s what love looks like. I don’t think that’s what help looks like.

There’s a better way

Therapy doesn’t have to be this. Support doesn’t have to cost us our authenticity. There are approaches that start with curiosity and consent, not correction. Approaches that see difference as sacred, not inconvenient.

The most radical shift isn’t even in the therapy itself - it’s in the questions we ask.

Not “How can we make this person more acceptable?”

But “What does this person need to feel safe and fully themselves?”

Not “How do we reduce the traits?”

But “How do we protect the person?”

And not just the child version of them. The grown one, too. The one who’s still learning how to remember they matter.

If you love someone like me

The worst part of compliance training isn’t the silence it demands - it’s what it steals. The ease of wanting something. The clarity of knowing. The right to be in your own life without apology.

I look at who I am now, and I know I built her from scraps of self that managed to survive all that erasure. But I’ll never know who I might’ve been if I hadn’t been taught to disappear.

Because we are not hard to love. And I still wonder who I might’ve become if I’d known that from the start.

--Elle

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I love this video explaining inevitability of harm with ABA therapy.

And for those of us needing advocacy rooted in lived experience, consider turning to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), a nonprofit led by autistic people themselves - actively involved in real ways in the shaping of policy, practice, and public understanding around autism.

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Want to Keep Exploring?

This space is still new, but it’s already full of big questions, half-formed truths, and stories that might sound a little like yours.

If you’re curious where to go next, here are a few places to wander:

• The Neurotypical Gift of Telling Stories in Real Time

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• Safety Nets I've Stitched for Myself: Why Autistic Safety Systems Matter

  For me, safety is about understanding how easily the world can misread me, how quickly my own brain can work against me if I push too hard, and how I’ve had to become both my own advocate and my own accommodation just to navigate the supposedly “ordinary” parts of life.

  
  

• The Neuroqueer Life Map Quickstart (free download)

  A gentle, self-paced journal for autistic, ADHD, AuDHD, queer or otherwise neurodivergent humans who are ready to unmask, unlearn, and rewrite their story from the inside out.

Or, if you just want to be here quietly. No pressure. No performance.

I love that you’re here.

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